How to Create a Poster Your design and experience

I want to share with you some of my poster design work and the tips that I came across during the process.

Over the past few months I have been working for a Nightclub in Newcastle, Australia designing their in-house posters (you can see a few below) advertising different events held at the club.

The problem with designing these in-house posters was that I had to design them to be printed at A3 and A5 while also being able to be viewed correctly in a square format at 150 x 150 pixels on the web. This was quite a design problem, but I did learn a lot throughout this process.

The 3 posters above were the first ones that I had designed without any knowledge of poster design.

After reviewing these posters on forums and with other designers I learnt that the first 3 posters I had designed were too busy, and there wasn’t a clear hierarchy.

This lead me to do a bit of research on poster design (which I should have done in the first place).

In a nutshell, I found that an an effective poster should be …

Aesthetic – It should get attention so the message is delivered.

Focused – It should focus on a single message.

Ordered – The sequence should be well-ordered and obvious.

If you then compare the first 3 posters to the poster I designed after the research (below), you can clearly see the difference. The poster now has a clear hierarchy with DRU HILL being the main focus and the date as the 2nd focus. It is aesthetic, focused and ordered thus making it a successful poster.

On a similar note, I have just designed an invite for my 20th birthday. This year, I have a fluoro (it’s spelt fluoro not fluro if you didn’t know) theme for my party as fluoro is in fashion this summer in Australia. Below is the invite that I designed for it. I was influenced heavily by the electric style of the clubs here in Sydney, along with their random combination of images and vector graphics.

What are your opinions? I take constructive criticism well so fire away 🙂 It’s how you learn.

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